Friday, January 19, 2007

Intel let it slip that the iPhone uses a Marvell Xscale chip. Intel would know too, since they used to own this line of chips and sold it to Marvell just last year.

It is likely a Marvell PXA900 series ARM architecture CPU, which is described as "an advanced total system solution for today's GSM, GPRS, and WCDMA mobile phones". The performance of this chip is supposedly in the 1000 MIPS range, which would make it about 20% faster than IBM's 849 MIPS 366 MHz PowerPC G3 750CX used in the second edition Firewire toilet seat iBook.

Too bad OS X 10.5 Leopard doesn't run as fast on old school G3 Macs as the stripped down version of it reportedly does on the iPhone.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Rogers Wireless has confirmed to us that they will be offering the iPhone in Canada. No date has yet been set for the iPhone release here, but they state that it will be a Rogers exclusive. No pricing information is available yet either.

It's unfortunate that Fido will not be getting this phone, but it is not surprising. The question now is whether an unlocked version of the phone will be available, either in the US or in Canada.

Apple today released their 2007 Q1 results, and they were stellar: Record $7.1 billion revenues and record $1.0 billion profit, or $1.14 profit per share. AAPL was up from $94.95 at close to $99.48 after the financial conference call initially in after hours trading, but it settled down later to just over $94. Some details:

1.606 million Macs shipped, including 969000 laptops21.066 million iPods shipped, up 50% year over yearGross margin was 31.2%, up sharplyCash reserves at $11.9 billion, up $1.75 billion this quarter

The 21 million iPods shipped last quarter shocked many analysts, but ironically Mac sales were lower than many predicted. In fact, despite this being the Christmas quarter and the fact that new laptops were released during this quarter, it was lower than the previous quarter's 1.61 million Macs shipped.

Perhaps it's this flat Mac sales and the rather tepid guidance for next quarter, along with the expected profit taking, that caused AAPL's drop to $94.17 after the conference call.